A-Level History: Weimar Germany, 1918–33

Weimar's fourteen years are the A-level laboratory for studying how democracies die, and the exam questions turn on weighing structural weakness against contingency. This quiz assembles the full case file.

The founding questions test the republic's compromised birth: the Ebert-Groener pact's bargain with the old army against the threat of Bolshevik-style revolution, and the constitution's celebrated flaws — proportional representation's unstable coalitions and Article 48's legal backdoor to rule without parliament, the mechanism that would ultimately be turned against the system itself. Versailles is examined for its political rather than merely economic burden: the war guilt clause and the stab-in-the-back myth as permanent solvents of republican legitimacy.

The 1923 cluster covers the year of crises with causal precision: passive resistance in the occupied Ruhr financed by the printing press, hyperinflation as its direct consequence, and the Munich Putsch — tested for its real significance, the propaganda platform Hitler's trial provided. The Stresemann era questions then weigh the recovery — Rentenmark, Dawes and Young Plans, Locarno — against its structural fragility, the dependence on short-term American credit.

The death of the republic completes the set: the Depression's destruction of coalition government and radicalisation of the electorate, the NSDAP's modern campaigning and electoral surge of 1930-32, and the backstairs intrigue — Papen's fatal confidence that Hitler could be tamed in a conservative cabinet — that delivered the chancellorship in January 1933. Each explanation weighs doom against contingency, the exact judgement the essay question demands.

• Explain the republic's founding compromises and constitutional weaknesses
• Assess Versailles' political burden and the legitimacy deficit
• Analyse the 1923 crises: Ruhr, hyperinflation, Munich Putsch
• Evaluate the Stresemann recovery and its structural fragility
• Explain the Depression, the NSDAP surge and the intrigue of 1932-33

Covers Weimar Germany (1918–1933) as taught in the widely studied A-level Germany courses: the revolution and constitution, Versailles, the 1923 crises, the Stresemann era, and the destruction of the republic.